The Conical Glass: For sentimental reasons

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

For sentimental reasons

One of the running themes of this blog has been my ongoing battle with clutter, most recently in my epic X-Mess series, which ended prematurely when I came down with a dust-induced cold. (I have a severe dust allergy, which makes cleaning perilous, yet necessary.) Joe and I have a little storage unit that came with our condo, and we try to clean it out every couple years or so. We decided Labor Day Weekend would be an appropriate time to tackle the job, so we pulled everything out.

In the storage unit, we keep our luggage, a fan and a heater, Christmas decorations, and the extra pillows that came with our already over-pillowed couch. Those are all keepers. Easy choices to go: Joe's crutches and "moon boot" from when he broke his ankle. Then there were the tapes.

Hundreds of cassette tapes, and a box full of video tapes. We'd sorted through these boxes a couple of years ago, and these were the ones we chose to keep. Only thing is, they hadn't been out of their boxes since. We really only listen to CDs and MP3s these days. So we filled up three big cardboard boxes with tapes. Out of everything, we kept only 50. We probably won't listen to those either, but these were the ones we just couldn't part with -- mix tapes we made for each other early in our relationship; family history interviews with my grandmother; some advance cassettes that have special meaning to me. But so much is going: tapes I recorded of my college radio show, mix tapes from long-ago friends and pen pals, live bootlegs of shows I attended.

You just can't keep everything, I tell myself, and unlike my grandmother -- how her children and grandchildren delighted in the things she'd left behind, from old letters and postcards to ancient theater programs -- I have no heirs, so eventually it'll all be so much junk anyway. By the way, my cast-offs are not headed to the landfill -- this is Berkeley, after all! -- but to the Alameda County Computer Resource Center, which recycles and reuses media detritus.

Even without the tapes, I have no shortage of possessions. I may be getting rid of my old radio shows, for instance, but I still have all the playlists in a file folder. I don't need 10 copies of a story I wrote for the Baltimore Sun Magazine way, way back in my journalist days, but I'm keeping one copy. And some of my old stuff lives online; for instance, I found an old VHS tape of "Siskel and Ebert" TV shows, which have recently been archived on the web. Who needs 20-year-old video tapes of MTV (back when they actually used to show music videos) when VH1 Classic and YouTube have all the 80s stuff you could possibly want?

There is still much left to purge. I just need more holiday weekends.

Speaking of the 80s, we did take a break on Monday to go see "The King of Kong," an extremely entertaining documentary about grown men competing for the all-time high score in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong. DK was always my game of choice when I was a wee lass hanging out at Aladdin's Castle at North Kent Mall, though as is emphasized in the movie, it is a particularly difficult one and it's really hard to make it past the first 2 or 3 screens. The last time I tried playing was about 8 years ago in an arcade on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and I lasted maybe all of 45 seconds. But even if you weren't a DK aficionado, "Kong" is good fun, focusing on the rivalry between Machiavellian video game titan Billy Mitchell and recently-unemployed lovable loser Steve Wiebe. The film's director has described them as "the Salieri and Mozart of 'Donkey Kong,'" which is a surprisingly apt analogy. So far "Kong" is only playing on 21 screens, but it's proven to be rather successful -- its planned "one-week-only" Berkeley engagement has now stretched to three -- so it may be hitting smaller markets eventually.

posted by 125records @ 11:29 PM

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